Our current teaching theme at church is:
"Spiritual Formation with no one to impress and nothing to prove."
Along those lines, I finished David G. Benner's fine little book 'Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality' last week (we're actually starting a class on the book this coming week). Ever since then I've been sitting with this piece from p.101:
Union with God is not something we achieve. It is not the summit of a spiritual mountain we are trying to ascend. It is a gift of Grace. We do, however, have an important role to play in accessing this grace. And that is the place of spiritual practices. They are the way in which we offer our consent to Grace.
Surrender is not the only means by which we access the grace of transformation, but it is the most important and most distinctively Christian. But surrender is not something that we only practice when we approach God with open hands and hearts in faith. It is something that we need to make a moment-by-moment part of how we live our life.
I'm not really even sure what to say about that yet...
I definitely believe it's true... and it is probably a difficult thing to hold onto and wrap my head around... sort of that need to hold it 'tightly but also loosely'...
Hmm... man, it's something to think about, alright.
1 comment:
Spiritual practices. Why is something that is obviously good for us so hard for us to do?
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